The Vagaries of Life

It’s weird, the loops life throws at you. You never know which road you’re going to wind up on, what direction you’re going to find yourself going in. You started out heading east, only to find yourself northbound, having no real idea which of your choices or decisions put you there instead of where you had planned to go. A person who wanted to be a doctor is an artist, one who wanted to be an artist is a lawyer, the jock from high school is a teacher, etc. Even my brother, someone who lived for airplanes and aeronautics, who I would have sworn was going to follow in my father’s footsteps and become an aeronautical engineer, wound up in theater, which is at the extreme opposite end of the spectrum. If that threw me for a loop, I can only imagine what it did to him.

There’ve been some changes to life in our house, some big, some small. As I’ve mentioned, the other half now being out of the proverbial closet is one of the biggest. We’ve reached a sort of understanding, in that he is aware that our present situation is not going to last forever. I have no intention of being alone for the rest of my life–romantically speaking. He and I are tied to each other forever through the children, and I am grateful to him and will forever love him for those two gifts he gave to me, both of which I didn’t think I’d ever have. The reality is, though, that the door has closed on a romantic relationship between the two of us. As much as he would like things to go back to the way they were, to fix things, he can’t. You can’t make yourself heterosexual, any more than you can make yourself homosexual. I understand why he’d prefer to try, though, given the stigmas and prejudices still attached to being gay–how could I not? I’m black, and there are those who attach nearly the same stigmas and prejudices to that. But it’s been proven, rightly or wrongly, that where I can’t hide from the color of my skin, he can hide his homosexuality. He did it for over a decade, and did it successfully. We only have two children, true, but there were five pregnancies. I’d say he’s got a pretty good success rate at hiding!

We’ve reached a lull in the arguing. That’s a good thing. We’ve found a sort of balance, I guess, for lack of a better term. We had been there before, until his confession that love had nothing to do with getting us together. That had shocked and hurt me. It told me that this man was far more calculating and manipulative than I had given him credit for. That’s how it translated to me. The fact that we have reached any sort of balance at all is stunning to me, and I would have to credit us both on that. In temperament, I’m not the easiest person to deal with (if my brother is reading this, he just rolled his eyes at that understatement), and since having children, I’m a lot less open to some things than I used to be, from a parental standpoint. My partner in parenting would say that I’ve become rigid and less inclined to fun. I would say that I’ve matured beyond certain types of “fun”, and become more aware of consequences that weren’t all that important to me before the kids came along. But how my actions affect my children is now a major part of my thinking. So yeah, as an example, I’m not tying an elastic band around my waist and jumping off the roof of a building for fun! What if that sucker breaks?!

As far as the rest of life, not everything has been focused on romantic relationships, or the lack thereof. I managed to pass Anatomy and Physiology. I even managed to pull it up to an 80%. Woot! So this sequence, I don’t attend classes physically, I just do the online portion. I don’t physically return to school until December, so I get to resume a little bit of normality. To that end, I’ve picked up some of my fiber arts again. You’d think I’d’ve gone back and finished one of the several projects I’d already started, right? Um…no. I started another one, a crocheted blanket using a technique called corner-to-corner, or C2C. I’d seen a gorgeous blanket made that way on Facebook and had to try my own. Yeah, yeah, I know, I’ve still got plenty of WIPs sitting around, and I’ll get back to them eventually! But crocheting a blanket is nicely mindless for me. I don’t have to worry about an actual pattern, I don’t have to really concentrate on what my hands are doing, and I can keep going until the blanket “feels” done.

The best news, from the children’s standpoint, is that we’ve added bunnies to the family. During the lab animal course, we naturally had to work on animals you would normally find in a lab situation, i.e., rats and rabbits. I’m a New Yorker. I’ve seen enough sewer rats that I don’t like their supposedly cuter, sweeter cousins. A rat is a rat is a rat, and I call the exterminator for them. Rabbits, though, are frigging adorable, and the school rabbits needed weekend homes. I took them both home for one weekend on a trial basis, to see how it would work with the dogs. It actually worked rather well, so we adopted one of the rabbits at the end of the sequence last week, then decided to get another one to keep her company yesterday. The grey one came from school and is absolutely fearless. Annoyingly, she has a marked preference for my PIP (partner-in-parenting), so he named her Snookums, which irks me to no end. I would rather call her Snooki, except that makes me think of that horrific show “Jersey Shore”. Still better than “Snookums”. Anyway. The brown and white one is the new kid. I picked her up yesterday and christened her Cynnamon. She is, at least for right now, a good deal shyer than Snooki, but she just left home, and moved in with two hyper kids, four huge dogs that must be terrifying in their curiosity, and two new adults. I would probably be a bit bent out of shape too.

So that’s it. Still here. Still clawing my way back to normality. Just like my other projects, it’s a WIP.